Computing update

A new Recovery Command Center has become a base of operations for recuperating from an electrical breaker trip that shut down several computing services at the laboratory on Feb. 17.

The Computing Division's Stu Fuess, Eileen Berman and Adam Walters lead meetings there each morning at 9 a.m. to discuss continuing strategy.

In the next week, CD employees will begin to move a group of machines, including some that help run scientific computing services and some that allow computer programmers to write and test software, from the Feynman Computing Center to the Grid Computing Facility. This will result in a temporary reduction of some related services.

CD employees will contact those who will be affected before making the move. Core IT servers that run e-mail, printing and fnal.gov Web sites will not be affected.

The move will ease the burden on the FCC's power supply as CD employees recover systems and services that have remained down since the breaker trip. FCC has been running at reduced power to prevent a possible recurrence of the trip. FESS employees are working on a plan to provide the computer rooms with more power.

If you have questions about the availability or priority of systems or services, please contact the Fermilab Service Desk at x2345 or through its Web site. The Computing Division will continue to provide updates about the recovery process and continued investigation into the outage.

Special event:
Book Fair: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24, and 8 a.m.-3 p.m. on Thursday, March 25. Wilson Hall Atrium.

Employees and users can also contact the Recreation Department to take advantage of special discounts, including an offer byRosati's Pizza of Batavia, of a 15 percent discount on all menu items for Fermilab employees.

In the News

The first T2K neutrino event observed at Super-Kamiokande

From Interactions.org, Feb. 24, 2010

Tsukuba, February 24, 2010. Physicists from the Japanese-led multinational T2K collaboration announced today that they had made the first detection of a neutrino which had travelled all the way under Japan from their neutrino beamline at the J-PARC facility in Tokai village (about an hour north of Tokyo by train) to the gigantic Super-Kamiokande underground detector near the west coast of Japan, 295 km (185 miles) away from Tokai.

"It is a big step forward," said T2K spokesperson Takashi Kobayashi. "We've been working hard for more than 10 years to make this happen."

They have constructed their new neutrino beamline, which will deliver the world's most powerful neutrino beams, to study the mysterious phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations, and the observation of this event proves that their study can now begin.

"Neutrinos are the elusive ghosts of particle physics," Kobayashi explains. "They come in three types, called electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos, which used to be thought to be immutable."

Recovery Act funds young U. of Colorado, LBNE physicist

Alysia Marino

Alysia Marino always knew she'd be a scientist of some kind. Still, it's something of a happy accident she ended up in physics.

"I think I was too klutzy for chemistry and too squeamish to really cut things open," she said. Physics required neither a steady hand nor a strong stomach, and so far the choice has proved a fruitful one for the University of Colorado assistant professor. Marino was recently awarded a five-year, $750,000 early career research grant from the Department of Energy, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Marino will focus on long-baseline neutrino research-first, for Japan's T2K experiment, then for Fermilab's Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. For the LBNE, Marino will concentrate on neutrinos and how to better measure their fraternal twins-muons-when they're fresh out of the beam source and beginning their journey.

The New Jersey native first encountered particle physics as a Princeton undergrad studying rare kaon decay. "It was the first time I really learned about how you detect all these short-lived particles," she said. She was hooked.

From particles that disappear in the blink of an eye, Marino moved on to particles as hardy as a Galapagos tortoise, but far more difficult to see: neutrinos. The mysterious particles can traverse vast reaches of space and stream through miles of solid rock without a single interaction.

Marino pursued neutrino research through a Ph.D. at Berkeley, and post-doc positions at Fermilab's MINOS and T2K at the University of Toronto. She began teaching at the University of Colorado in January 2009.

Marino is still not over the surprise of her recent award. You could hear a smile in her voices; she said, "It's a very valuable thing to a young physicist trying to establish a research program."